Why do frozen, raw chicken products keep getting recalled for salmonella? Wouldn’t the solution be to cook the product properly? All raw chicken could contain salmonella.
In: Biology
Suppose your chicken is heavily contaminated with salmonella. First, in order to ensure that all of the salmonella has been killed, everything has to be cooked to at least 165 for several minutes. If you miss any little spot, you can still be infected since millions of salmonella can pack into one square centimeter of a surface.
But if the contamination is really bad, you’ll still feel sick even if you kill all of the bacteria. Salmonella are gram-negative bacteria, and that type of bacteria expresses special toxins in their membranes which humans have special receptors for. Even if there’s no living salmonella to infect you, these proteins and biomolecules will still give you a fever and probably make you vomit.
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